Democracy has meant to many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.” The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything particularist is ruled out. When we accept fully the principle of rights involved in the group theory of association, it will change the decisions of our courts, our state constitutions, and all the concrete machinery of government. The truth of the whole matter is that our only concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.[63] As an understanding of the group process abolishes “individual rights,” so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except as an essential member of a group. The particularist idea of liberty was either negative, depending on the removal of barriers, or it was quantitative, something which I had left over after the state had restrained me in every way it thought necessary. But liberty is not measured by the number of restraints we do not have, but by the number of spontaneous activities we do have. Law and liberty are not like the two halves of this page, mutually exclusive—one is involved in the other. One does not decrease as the other increases. Liberty and law go hand in hand and increase together in the larger synthesis of life we are here trying to make. We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying ourself. Ideally the state is such a group, actually it is not, but it depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression, not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state.